Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, dislikes the GNOME desktop. There was a big flame war(s) between Linus Torvalds and the GNOME community. At one point he claimed that – “Gnome seems to be developed by interface Nazis and that its developers believe their users are idiots“. And guess what? Who made the switch to Gnome?

Good news for all developers! QT will be available under the LGPL starting with version 4.5. The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. The LGPL places copyleft restrictions on the program itself but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely links with the program. There are, however, certain other restrictions on this software. The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications, most notably Mozilla and OpenOffice.org.

This option could increase Qt usage and adoption. You may see more cross platform commercial application on the Linux desktop. This is huge news for cross-platform developers.

Canonical the makers of Ubuntu about to introduce a new desktop notification system proposal. New changes should improve the usability of the Linux desktop including desktop notification system for both GNOME and KDE. From the Mark Shuttleworth blog:

The key proposals we are making are that:

* There should be no actions on notifications. * Notifications should not be displayed synchronously, but may be queued. Our implementation of the notification display daemon will display only one notification at a time, others may do it differently.

That’s pretty much it. There are some subtleties and variations, but these are the key changes we are proposing, and which we will explore in a netbook device with a partner, as well as in the general Ubuntu 9.04 release, schedule gods being willing.

Here is a quick tip to kill a crashed Linux / UNIX X desktop system. Many new user do not know this simple tip and end up hitting computer reboot button. Press CTRL + ALT + Backspace to kill GUI and get back to login screen. There are more ways to kill a crashed desktop without restarting your computer.

KDE version 4.0.1 has been released and available for download. KDE 4.0.1 is a maintenance release for version 4.0, which provides corrections of problems reported by users. From the announcement page:

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0.1, the first bugfix and maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.0.1 ships with a basic desktop and many other packages like administration, network, education, utilities, multimedia, games, artwork, web development and more. KDE’s award-winning tools and applications are available in almost 50 languages.

KDE 4 has been released. I’ve received couple of questions about installing KDE 4 under Ubuntu Linux 7.10. KDE 4 Packages are available for Ubuntu Linux version 7.10 (Gutsy) and from development Ubuntu Linux Hardy version. They install to /usr/lib/kde4 and can be installed alongside your existing KDE 3. However these packages are not compatible with KDE 4 beta packages. Following simple step will help you install KDE 4.

How do I install KDE 4 under Ubuntu Linux?

First you need to update Ubuntu package source file.

WARNING! These examples may crash your Desktop as KDE v4.0 packages are not 100% compatible with Ubuntu 7.10. Following instructions worked on my desktop but failed to work on Laptop. YMMV.

Step # 1: Update Source File

Open a terminal

Open /etc/apt/sources.list file using a text editor such as vi or gedit, enter:$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list OR$ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list Append following line:deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main Close and save the file. Type the following command to update package list:$ sudo apt-get update

References:

Qt is the standard framework for high performance, cross-platform application development. Trolltech ASA is licensing its Qt cross-platform development framework under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3), with immediate effect. GNU founder Richard Stallman said:

I am very pleased that Trolltech has decided to make Qt avaliable under GPL v3. This will allow parts of KDE to adopt GPL v3 too. Even better, Trolltech has made provisions for a smooth migration to future GPL versions if it approves of them.

Qt is already available under the GPL v2 and will continue to be so in addition to the GPL v3.

The GPL v3 license will make it easy and safe for free software developers to use Trolltech’s Qt with the most recent license framework from the Free Software Foundation. Trolltech hopes that its move will inspire free software projects to use GPL v3 when programming with Qt.

KDE4 has been released and available for download. KDE is a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix and Linux workstations. It is based on the version 4 series of Qt (a cross-platform GUI application development framework).

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. It will contain a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. It will also include the new desktop and panel user interface tool, called Plasma, which will have support for desktop widgets, similar to SuperKaramba or Apple’s Dashboard widgets.

(Fig. 01: The KDE v.4.0 Desktop)

The KDE 4.0 Visual Guide provides a quick overview of various new and improved KDE 4.0 technologies. Illustrated with many screenshots, it walks you through the different parts of KDE 4.0 and shows some of the exciting new technologies and improvements for the user.

Dolphin is a file manager for KDE focusing on usability. The KDE 3 version of Dolphin is in beta stage, but provides already most features for daily usage. Currently Dolphin gets ported for KDE 4.0. I really liked its simplicity.

The main features of Dolphin are:

* Navigation bar for URLs, which allows to navigate quickly through the file hierarchy.

* View properties are remembered for each folder.

* Split of views is supported.

* Network transparency.

* Undo/redo functionality.

* Renaming of a variable number of selected items in one step and much more

Install dolphin

Debian / Ubuntu Linux user, type:$ sudo apt-get install dolphin

To start dolphin start KDE or type:$ dolphin &

From the man page:

dolphin is not intended to be a competitor to Konqueror, the default KDE file manager: Konqueror acts as universal viewer being able to show HTML pages, text documents, directories and a lot more, whereas dolphin focuses on being only a file manager. This approach allows to optimize the user interface for the task of file management.